The Impossible Only Takes A While
Photo by NASA
Every NYC Fair Trade Coalition tabling I’ve volunteered at, including the one I dragged my sister to on Saturday, you’ll always get a couple of smart-alecky yahoos who’ll ask you why you’re doing this—Why bother? You’re just one small group of people. You’re just one person. Nothing’s going to change unless the big political guns get involved. Major Debbie Downers. Then I bring up Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks … Abraham frickin’ Lincoln. The odds were phenomally stacked against them; their contemporaries pooh-poohed them. One person who said no to the status quo.
And yet if it hadn’t been for that one person, women would still be barred from voting booths. Racial segregation would still be a wanton, rampaging disease.
Small moves. Big changes.
But for every smart-alecky yahoo, you’ll educate someone and recognize the glimmer of newfound resolution in their eyes; an intent and decisiveness that wasn’t there before. And you sense a barely perceptible shift in the way they’ll make their choices now. These folks will go out into that messed-up jumbled world of ours and communicate these new ideas to other people, propagating like phagocytes fighting an infection.
And that’s why I do this.
“There’s no such thing as impossible; there’s only not trying.”—Charles de Lint
Adelin said,
July 17, 2006 at 11:51 am
I like that you call them peeps “yahoo”s :)
Summer said,
July 17, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Well said Jasmin. I’m with ya.
Ani said,
July 17, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Keep fighting the good fight! I’m always picking up ideas from you. See, you have proof you are educating the folks! “We are fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”–Japanese proverb
mim said,
July 18, 2006 at 11:24 am
keep subverting the dominant paradigm!
Jennifer said,
July 18, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Here’s another name for your list: Mary Anne Evans, aka George Elliot, the British author who wrote “Silas Marner,” “The Mill on the Floss” and “Middlemarch.” She created a word called “meliorism.” Here’s an exerpt from a 1999 Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial:
“Meliorism has sometimes been described as a sort of a compromise, a midpoint in a spectrum ranging from pessimism to optimism, but in its inventor’s mind it had the additional and important quality of personal involvement. Optimists and pessimists can remain inert, disconnected from the world they survey; a meliorist cannot.
‘Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds,’ she wrote, and here she referred not only to the accomplishments that might be measured as heroic, historic or grand. Meliorism is also an everyday, everyman kind of thing, and a lens we might use for examining our daily lives, in search of opportunities to try.
‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,’ she wrote as ‘Middlemarch’ came to an end, “and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’”
budak said,
July 18, 2006 at 10:19 pm
can i quote you (and the comments)?